Wales is Beautiful but…HILLY.

So we have been travelling through Wales for 4 days now and we have discovered it is quite a hilly place. The first day of riding we thought would be a mellow 25 mile day but we ended up following a national bicycle route that took us up down and around and we ended up doing about 45 miles after we got of the ferry around 1 pm. Camping that night was very cold especially for Gen whose camelback leaked in her tent. We woke up the next day quite damp and didn’t get out of camp until close to 12 noon. Once on the road we almost immediately started climbing again. We believe we went over a 1300 foot pass. Luckily there were lots of sheep to distract us from the burning in our legs. They must have been quite frightened by us because every time we would pass one they would run a few feet down the road squat down and pee. Since what goes us must come down we did have a nice long down hill to cool us off. After several hours of this up and down without finding any convince stores we were all about to keel over with exhaustion when we finally found a restaurant/bar. We had a nice warm meal of beef pie (huli and I), potato’s, mushy pees (Gen) and coffee. We had a nice chat with one of the men at the bar who said we must be from the east coast of the USA because we were friendly enough to talk to him. Sorry for the bad rap west coasters. We were glad to hear from the people at the restaurant that it was all down hill to a campsite half a mile away. After spending several hours in the restaurant we were happy to roll right into camp. It was a warmer night than the pervious one and we were all well rested and able to get on the road by 9:30 the next day. We continued the down hill trend all the way to a village were we thought we might find a map ( I have only had the GPS to navigate) but there wasn’t one. We continued on the main road until the next town with an information centre and finally got a map of Wales. Now we could see that we had taken the road straight through the “mountains.” We continued to follow the main road which went mostly down and slightly into the wind until it started to drizzle and we decided to set up camp. One of our fellow campers told us the weather was going to be nasty for the next 3 days so we got permission to set up camp under the pavilion and just as it started to lash we grabbed our tents and ran them to cover. It was quite rainy when we woke up this morning so we decided to give our selves a rest day here. The weather is now starting to clear up so hopefully it will stay this way for tomorrow.

Wales is a beautiful place full of rolling and steep hills with green pastures, lots of sheep and cows, a few pigs and chickens and some massive dogs. Overall we have all loved the landscape and the people here but will be glad to continue on tomorrow.

Signing off...Emma

ps. sorry for any mistakes but i was typing very fast since i only paid for a half hour on the computer.